Cow abuse at dairy: Extreme case or common practice?

A criminal investigation has been opened into the mistreatment of cows at an Okeechobee dairy that supplies Publix, after an undercover video released Thursday appeared to show workers beating cows with metal rods. The Okeechobee County sheriff is investigating.

The video was horrifying: Dairy workers whipped cows with chains, kicked them and used tractors to hoist up sick cows and pack them onto trucks, as the animals moaned in pain.

The 2014 video from a New Mexico dairy led to charges against four workers and the shutdown of the dairy, a major supplier of pizza cheese. It was one in a series of undercover videos that animal rights activists say show real life on dairy farms, an assertion that the dairy industry vigorously denies.

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After a video surfaced Thursday of dairy workers beating cows with metal rods at a dairy in Okeechobee County, Publix suspended that dairy’s deliveries and the Okeechobee County sheriff announced a criminal investigation.

While the industry claims the abuse shown at Larson Dairy Farm was atypical for businesses that value the well-being of their cows, animal rights groups say such mistreatment is common. They say the dairy industry breeds cows to produce an unnatural quantity of milk, leading to joint problems, painful udder infections and difficulty walking, which in turn leads workers to beat them to force them into milking stalls.

“These are very sick animals with a lot of health problems at a young age, and the workers are expected to move them in and out of the milking parlors three times a day,” said Matt Rice, executive vice president of Mercy for Animals, which conducts undercover farm investigations. “And so when these animals are in pain or they go down, which happens often, the workers routinely resort to kicking and punching and stabbing animals.”

Several cases of abuse at dairies has been captured on video tape prior to the Okeechobee County case.A 2015 video from a dairy in Colorado led to the firing of five workers after they were shown jabbing cows with metal poles, sometimes in their udders, and hitting them with milking equipment. Another from a Wisconsin dairy in 2015 showed similar abuse, with workers cutting off cows’ tails with shears and no painkillers.

The dairy industry strongly disagrees that these videos expose routine practices, saying the mistreatment shown in videos represents unethical practices that would get any farm in trouble and cause cows stress that would reduce milk production.

“We do not condone that type of behavior,” said Dr. Karen Jordan, a veterinarian with the National Milk Producers Federation, whose family owns a dairy farm in North Carolina and who viewed the Okeechobee video. “Even if you’re having a bad day, you cannot take it out on the animals. I have no idea why these employees treated these animals in this manner. But as an industry, we do not do that.”

The federation will be sending an auditor to Larson next week to check on employee training and other issues that could be involved with the mistreatment, she said. The federation is self-policing, and a dairy found to have many animal welfare deficiencies could lose the ability to ship its milk, she said. More immediately, she said, such abuse can reduce a dairy’s output, giving owners every incentive to protect their animals from mistreatment.

“When you see ugly treatment like that, that cow now when she comes back in the parlor she’s upset,” she said. “She doesn’t want to let her milk down. From the money side of things, that is more damaging.”

The undercover video at Larson was taken by a member of Animal Recovery Mission, a Miami Beach group that has conducted similar investigations to expose illegal slaughterhouses and which advocates a vegan, or plant-based, diet. The worker, who got a job at Larson in August, took video that appeared to show the dairy’s workers beating cows with rods as the cows struggle to avoid the blows, kicking them and punching them to get them in and out of milking stalls and to hook up the milking apparatus. It shows female calves penned in narrow outdoor cages, one with deformed legs unable to stand up.

The dairy’s owner, Jacob Larson, issued a written statement Thursday saying “we are are deeply saddened and appalled” by the abuse on the video, adding that one employee had already been fired and further actions may be taken.

Emily Miller-Cushon, assistant professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Animal Sciences and an expert on farm animal welfare, said the video was not representative of her experience of dairy farms.

“The dairy producers I interact with care deeply about their cows and understand that animal welfare and productivity are linked - supporting the well-being of their animals is in everyone's best interest,” she said. “Examples of abuse like seen on that video are far from the norm and just as concerning to dairy producers as they are to the public.”

And Florida Dairy Farmers, which represents the state’s 130 dairy farms, issued a statement saying its members “have zero tolerance for animal abuse. This incident in no way reflects the animal care practices of the hard-working dairy farming families across Florida or the country.”

But even without beatings or other physical abuse, Rice, of Mercy for Animals, said dairy farming involves the inherently cruel separation of mother from calf immediately after birth.

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“It’s an industry that relies on separating babies from their mothers immediately after they’re born so that all of their milk can be sold for profit,” he said. “These babies are often, if they’re male, sold into the veal industry, where they’re chained by their necks inside a tiny crate.”

And Matthew Prescott, senior director of food policy for The Humane Society of the United States, said that for cows dairy farms are places of suffering.

“Most dairy cows live lives of deprivation on factory farms,” he said. “They’re constantly impregnated, only to have their babies taken away immediately and they live hooked up to machines that pump unnaturally-large quantities of milk from them.”

Jordan acknowledged the immediate separation of mother and calf, but said there were sound animal husbandry reasons for doing so.

“It’s kind of now the lady has the baby and now she puts it in day care,” she said. “We can do a real good job of disease control and monitoring the growth of the baby calf, versus if we let the babies run with the moms, they get nasty, they get dirty, they get stomped. It’s just not appropriate.”